One of my favorite projects this year was a capacity building project for emergency food providers statewide. Tracy Wilking, Washington Food Coalition Executive Director, Cory Sbarbaro, and I worked closely together to document challenges facing food banks, meal programs and food distribution centers, as well as to catalog best practices across seven areas of inquiry. Creating a best practices catalog turned out to be a challenge–we had to develop a methodology to identify best practices, and figure out how best to document them so that others could learn from and (as appropriate) replicate them.
The resulting report, Recipes For Success: 97 Innovations and Solutions Developed by Emergency Food Providers in Washington State, is now available online. We hope it will be useful to emergency food providers across Washington State and beyond.
Some amazing things I learned:
-25% of all volunteer hours nationwide are spent collecting, sorting and distributing food to the hungry
-Food donations have dropped considerably with the advent of the secondary market in foodstuffs (i.e. Grocery Outlet) even as the number of hungry people (including working families) continues to increase
-More and more donations are frozen or fresh (perishable), which may be good news nutritionally, but poses new challenges for emergency food networks who now need refrigerated trucks, walk-in freezers and other expensive equipment to operate
-Anti-hunger activists are making connections between food banks and farmers markets, teaching poor people to grow their own food and cook whole foods, gleaning fruits and vegetables (local and often organic) for delivery to local food banks, and many more creative strategies to increase quality and nutritional density of food bank offerings.